Chanson douce, Leïla Slimani's second novel, won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 and became a publishing phenomenon in France before appearing in English as Lullaby (UK) and The Perfect Nanny (US). It opens with its ending already known: the two young children of a Parisian couple are dead, killed by Louise, the nanny they had come to trust completely.
From that shattering first scene, the novel circles back to trace how the family reached this point. Myriam, a lawyer, returns to work after years at home and hires Louise, who quickly seems irreplaceable — devoted, tidy, endlessly capable, folded so seamlessly into the household that the parents scarcely notice how much of their lives she now holds. Slimani builds the dread slowly, in cool, precise prose, exposing the fault lines of class, money, dependency, and the quiet exploitation that can run beneath an intimate domestic arrangement.
Loosely inspired by a real New York case, Chanson douce is less a whodunit than a study of the forces that make such a horror imaginable — a taut, unsettling literary thriller about motherhood, work, and the people we invite into our homes.